


Moon and Mirror

by suitesamba



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Allegory, Angst, First Time, Lyricism, M/M, Magical Realism, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-08
Updated: 2017-09-08
Packaged: 2018-12-25 09:34:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12033159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suitesamba/pseuds/suitesamba
Summary: In a world where one's eye colour defines the direction of their life, Sherlock is born.





	Moon and Mirror

**Author's Note:**

> A bit of magical realism mixed with allegory wrapped up in a colourful package. Enjoy.

__

One

He enters the world in a late-spring rain, and his exhausted mother studies his perfect little face, and patiently waits. They’ve left her alone with the child, as is the custom, carefully averting their gaze from his face.

True colours are best. Blues that are not grey, browns and greens that stray from hazel. Deep browns, emerald greens, cobalt blues, steel greys. Lesser shades can be named, but call character into question, and the child’s life will be one of character building to compensate for the deficiency.

This child’s eyes, when at last he opens them, are the stormy skies of the hour of his birth, the rain-drenched grass of the meadows, the hazel hues of the fields in harvest. They are no colour and every colour, and she can’t name them, and where will her all-coloured child fit in this rigidly-hued world? 

His father waits outside the room. _Another grey, like his father and brother._ Or _A blue gem, to make a pair_. But this time, no. _Too early to tell – a week, or two, and we’ll know for sure._ And people will politely look away, and hide their pity, and offer unfelt assurances. _It happens sometimes. He came a bit early, didn’t he?_

Puzzled and enchanted, she stares into her small son’s eyes, and now – even now in this first hour of his life – shining specks float in the tiny irises like the raindrops that catch the sun through the green and gold glass of the window above her bed. She shifts to put him to her breast, and touches his baby-soft cheek as she feeds him, humming the song of the children

_What will I be, da? What will I be? Look in my eyes, da, whisper to me. Brown for the earth, child, blue for the sea, grey for the castle, lad, green for the lea._

_Two_

He is six years old and his mother is his teacher. His brother is grey and his sister blue, and they go off to different schools in their neat uniforms and learn the structure of the world and their places in it. Father is grey like Mycroft and Mummy green – and how did grey and green make Euros’ blue, he wonders, but he hasn’t been able to puzzle that one out yet. He is perfectly fine staying home. He has a magnifying lens and a spade, a compass and a star-chart, a collection of rocks, coins from around the world. He plants the garden with Mummy, and the soil and bugs are just as fine as the sprouting seeds. Mummy reads to him about the stars from her seat on the garden bench while he lies on the grass, watching the clouds form shapes, digging his bare feet into the loose earth he’s worked up with his toes.

“Blue isn’t just the sea. Blue is the sky, and the sea isn’t really blue at all.”

“Sea and sky go together, Sherlock. It’s only sea in the song, for the rhyme.”

“I don’t like the sea. Euros can have the stupid sea.”

And Mummy smiles, and keeps on reading.

_Three_

He is ten years old when he meets the sea.

He stands beside Mummy on the narrow stretch of rocky sand while Euros runs into the water and bounces in the waves. 

He drops to his bottom, and pulls his knees up, balancing his chin on them as he stares at the line where ocean meets sky. His fingers dig into the sand, and he is distracted by a gull as it fishes a shell from a shallow tidepool. 

Euros can play in the water, and bounce in the waves, and not once be concerned about the sand and stones beneath her toes. She is wind and sky, flow of water, and she cares not for things that grow from the earth, things that are anchored in place like trees and mountains. She has learned her place and embraces her path.

But Sherlock, when his eyes sparkle blue, cannot love the sea without thought of the moon, or stand on a wall’s edge, catching the wind with arms outspread, without fear of the pavement below. 

Mummy stands beside him as his mind contemplates this paradox of life before him, and she doesn’t hurry him. Euros plays in the water, wrinkled skin and blue-hued lips, as the sun sinks to the horizon. Sherlock watches the colours spread across the surface of the sea and the tears on his cheeks shine red and orange and gold, crystal drops of sunset, liquid prisms of light.

_Four_

He is seventeen now, and Euros is gone to academy, and Mycroft is in his London tower. He has consumed knowledge and experience, has read all there is to read, has sorted the world into file drawers of data, tactile experiences, nebulous dreams and concrete thoughts, and stored it in the palatial expanses of his glorious mind.

He has learned to close doors to block the sun, open windows to feel the breeze. He can walk through the fields with virtual blinders, slip through the crowds on the streets of London unnoticed, neither blue nor green nor grey nor brown, an invisible man veiled in the shadows of the colours around him.

He wonders if this is how Mycroft feels – safe and smug, behind a wall of knowledge, undistracted by light and sound and texture. He finds life easier this way, though passersby still look back again at his eyes when they pass, and turn their heads away in pity.

He tells himself he doesn’t care, and goes about his solitary, singularly-coloured life, and fits himself into left-over spaces, with left-over people.

His mum misses the bright specks of fading rainbow in his eyes, which have settled into an odd sort of hazel, but she thinks Sherlock will find peace, at least. She misses the child in the man, and on his eighteenth birthday, she gifts him her mother’s gift, as tradition dictates – something to recall his childhood and shape the adult he is to be.

He holds the violin in both hands, traces the curve of the wood with fingers that learned to feel the texture of sand and soil and leaf. He has no words but he needs no words. The violin sings for him, speaks for him, and when he plays it, in the sitting room, before the window, the colours dance behind closed eyes and chase away the cold east wind.

_Five_

He is thirty-two. He’s fallen into temptation, risen again, carved a path forward. People march in coloured bands around him, unnoticed and unimportant, save the few misfits he’s gathered close. Lestrade and Molly and Mrs. Hudson are brown, of earth and the people who walk it, but they teeter on green, dabble in blue, skirt around grey. Mycroft is a solidly steel grey, painful, acute reality dimming his dappled horizon. Like the east wind, Euros has gathered a storm and flown away, a force who will return on an unknown, unlooked for day.

His life, he thinks, is all that it can be. He can be nothing but an outcast, living on the fringes, even when his eyes coalesce into hazel too light to be brown, too green to be grey.

But one day, in Molly’s lab, he looks up from his work and meets a pair of eyes that defy description.

John Watson does not flinch at his oddly-hued eyes. He is not fooled by their near-hazel matte. 

Sherlock has never met someone who has held his gaze for more than a second or two, who isn’t disquieted by his ambiguous eyes.

By his actions alone in the next forty-eight hours, John will coax those eyes out of their hazel gauze, back into the tempestuous storms of blue and grey and brown and green of his birth, and, panting on a London street corner after a merry chase, will witness a prismatic flash of rainbow sapphire.

He is enchanted, ensnared. 

He is a chameleon. A doctor in brown, a soldier in grey, a blood brother in green. Where Sherlock stands out, John blends in, his eyes the perfect antithesis to Sherlock’s undefinable colour. He looks at Sherlock with unbridled awe, not pity, not derision, and studies his eyes until he’s committed them to memory. 

And when Sherlock plays his violin at the window that night when sleep eludes him, John pads down the stairs and watches from the shadows. The notes fall to his skin like brands of light, and he colours them golden, and steps forward, and beckons to Sherlock.

 

__

_Six_

He is thirty-two and in another’s bed for the first time in his life. John straddles his body, runs his hands over moon-drenched skin, worships him in darkness where colours are meaningless and no one intrudes to cast a disapproving glance.

He needs no instruction – no colour chart of appropriate actions and reactions, no handbook of proper social norms. In this room, on this bed, with this man, he is Sherlock Holmes laid bare, and the palace he’s built to put structure around a restrictively-coloured world cannot contain this truest of moments, this most honest and raw release.

He opens his eyes as John kisses him, touches the side of John’s face, whispers his name into his mouth.

They look into each other’s eyes, and absorb the moment, absorb each other, and the tears on Sherlock’s cheek have no colour, and John kisses them away as Sherlock reorders his world, turns it inside out.

No longer an outsider peeking in the windows. No longer skirting the edges of deep browns and true blues.

This night they are moon and mirror, and when morning comes, they are wrapped together, indivisible, shadow and sun.


End file.
